Zihua Li
About
Engineering leader. I've built tools people work in, from collaborative editors at Shimo and Slab to open-source infrastructure like ioredis. Now I build ones that work for them.
Projects
ioredis
Node.js client for Redis, acquired by Redis Ltd. in 2023. 110M+ downloads a month and 15K+ GitHub stars.
Readability
Turns web pages into clean, readable text. 2.5K+ GitHub stars.
Publications
Redis Beginner's Guide
Posts & Telecom Press · 2013
China's first book on Redis. #1 in Amazon's database category in its launch week, with 30K+ copies sold.
Education
Beihang University
B.S. Software Engineering · 2009–2013
Co-founded a startup at university and raised two seed rounds.
Work Experience
Engineering Lead · 2019–2025
- Led frontend architecture and technical strategy for a distributed team across the US and Europe.
- Core maintainer of Quill, the open-source editor with 47K+ GitHub stars. Led the Quill 2.0 release and built OT-based collaborative editing for tables.
- Built AI-powered autocomplete and custom spell checking for the editor, giving writers real-time help.
- Partnered with design on a scalable, accessible design system that sped up delivery across teams.
- Tuned the GraphQL layer of large React apps to cut over-fetching and speed up queries.
CTO · 2015–2019
- Led a 100+ person engineering organization across frontend, backend, SRE, mobile and QA.
- Grew the team from 15 to 100+ across two cities through targeted recruiting.
- Set performance standards and built a self-driven culture of ownership.
- Stayed hands-on in real-time collaborative editing, system architecture and cross-platform apps (Electron, web, React Native).
Senior Engineer · 2014–2015
Senior Full-Stack Engineer · 2013–2014